The Book Chase May 2021 Reading Plan

May caught me by surprise - I suppose because every day and every month has been pretty much like the one that preceded it for more than a year now. For that reason, I'm more or less organizing the month's reading plan on the fly, and my actual May reading may end up bearing little resemblance to what I see ahead of me right now:

Lonesome Dove, despite the fact that I've been slowly enjoying it for weeks, will end up being called a May book because I'm now down to about 25 pages to go in this 946-page masterpiece. I'll almost certainly finish it today. This is my third time reading Larry McMurtry's most famous book, and I am thrilled that it has held up so well again. Since I only read it every decade or so, it has remained as fresh - and as moving - as it was my first time through. Now, I can't wait to re-read the other novels featuring Gus and Call.

Sayaka Murata's Earthlings is another of the books I was already reading coming into this new month. I am about two-thirds of the way through the audiobook version, and although I'm growing a little weary of the book's reader, I'm still intrigued about where this one seems to be heading. I haven't reached the climax yet, but I'm hoping that it's headed where I think it is. Some of the characters in Earthlings resemble the main characters from Murata's Convenience Store Woman enough that I'm starting to wonder if Murata herself is not a bit obsessed by the theme of the two novels. 

Even though Paul Theroux is a writer whose work I've often enjoyed in the past, I'm finding it difficult to get into his latest novel. Under the Wave at Waimea is about an over-the-hill surfer who is now struggling to win against his much younger competition. That's a world I can't identify with, but I think I'll eventually lock into the book's rhythm because it's really, I think and hope, a mystery about what happens after the old surfer runs over someone while driving home from the bar one night. Theroux is just too good a writer for me not to give this one another try.

The Real Cool Killers is a 1959 novel from Chester Himes's Harlem Detective series featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones (just those names make me want to read the book). Himes is a black writer who started publishing short stories while serving time in prison for armed robbery convictions. His work is still seen as having been quite influential in the genre, and after leaving prison and moving to Europe for the rest of his life, his books were popular there as well. I've never read Himes, so I don't know know what to expect.

Hard to believe, but Not Dark Yet is book number twenty-seven in Peter Robinson's DCI Banks series. Banks is a Yorkshire cop I've not completely warmed up to despite now having read the first five and the last two books in the series. I do have to say that I've enjoyed the last two more than I did those at the beginning of the series, so I'm hoping that this one works well for me. I think my problem with the books has been that so little of Banks's personal life is shared with the reader. The novels are, however, excellent police procedurals. 

I've read and enjoyed several of Mike Bond's books in the past, and I've just recently received a review copy of his new one, America: Volume 1. The novel is the first book in a seven-book series via which Bond plans to explore life in America decade-by-decade beginning here with the 1960s. It focuses on two couples who come of age during that decade and how such a volatile time changed and influenced them for the rest of their lives. This was my own coming-of-age decade, so I'm curious to see what Bond has to say about it.

The infamous Blake Bailey biography of Philip Roth arrived yesterday as Amazon promised, and I've already taken a quick look at it. I'm impressed with the physical quality of the book, including its approximately 100 photos, and its organization. But Philip Roth: The Biography is over 800 pages long, so it is unlikely that I will finish it during May. It will most likely instead turn into a multi-month read much like Lonesome Dove has done. Yes, Blake Bailey may very well turn out to be the criminal he is accused of being...not his book. 

I really dislike this cover of Elmore Leonard's Hombre, but don't let it put you off the book itself. Leonard started his career as a western writer, and had great success in that genre in print and movie versions of his stories. Hombre (1961) is one of the best of them, and it may even have been a little ahead of its time because it's the story of a man who, because he was raised by Apaches, is held in contempt by the white settlers around him right up until he's the only thing standing between them and death. Considered by many to be one of the best westerns ever written, it was also adapted into what became one of Paul Newman's best-remembered movies.

Of course, I expect at least three or four other books to demand immediate attention - some I already have on board, and some I don't even know about yet - so things will change. It's only a question of by how much.